TV REVIEW : Provocative Journey Into the ‘Fatherland’

HBO’s “Fatherland” imagines the unthinkable: the state of the world 20 years after the defeat of the Allies in World War II.

Hitler, the master of all Europe, is celebrating his 75th birthday and has invited the world’s press to Berlin, the capital of greater Germania. Under Albert Speer’s zealous rebuilding, Berlin’s architecture is all austere granite and marble. The Gestapo is a drumbeat away, and the SS still walk the streets, assuring a spotless, sterile city that’s the image of George Orwell’s “1984.”

In fact, not much has changed at all except that the world, including most of the Fatherland itself, believes the official, state explanation that 6 million or 7 million missing Jews were transported during the war to permanent relocation centers in “the east.”

In the movie’s immediate foreground is a tale of suspense involving an American journalist (the plucky Miranda Richardson) and a German SS detective (the staunch Rutger Hauer). Both unwittingly embark on a path that will reveal the secret behind several suspicious deaths among elite party officials and expose the Third Reich’s staggering cover-up of the Final Solution.

Based on the novel by Robert Harris and shot in Prague, with some great special effects creating the physical texture of the new Germania, “Fatherland” capitalizes on our public memory of old newsreel clips. Crucial is the opening four-minute sequence, which encapsulates the defeat of the Allies at Normandy and Germania’s 20-year Cold War with the United States, which is now thawing out with the arrival of U.S. President Joseph P. Kennedy (a Hitler favorite) to sign an alliance with the Fuhrer against those damned Russians, who are still fighting Germany in 1965.

The Hauer/Richardson political intrigue does get a touch murky but it’s deftly sorted out under Christopher Menaul’s crisp direction and a script by Stanley Weiser and Ron Hutchinson that turns a thriller on one level into a ripe, speculative metaphor/nightmare.

“Fatherland” is not at all an improbable rewriting of history. After all, Hitler came that close.

* “Fatherland” airs at 8 tonight on HBO.